Explanation for killing still unclear
He was like the boxer who doesn’t know how badly he’s losing, and remains on his feet, as if he were landing the blows, not absorbing them, and who then is shocked — no, stunned — to hear the TKO go to the other guy.
So did Emmanuel OwusuAnsah endure, stubbornly insisting on the one hand that, heavens, he never meant to harm the former girlfriend he has on the other hand admitted killing and then burning.
He is pleading not guilty — in a curious fashion, since he’s acknowledged he did the deed — to first-degree murder in the Jan. 19, 2013 slaying of 27-yearold Bridget Takyi in Toronto.
Owusu-Ansah’s preposterous claim that he’d never meant to harm Takyi saw prosecutor Michael Cantlon abandon his cool approach. “Are you saying you didn’t
harm Bridget?” he asked in a voice thick with emotion.
“Actions I couldn’t control caused the death of the mother of my children,” Owusu-Ansah replied.
“You killed her? Make no mistake about that?” Cantlon asked. “Yes,” said Owusu-Ansah. “And after you killed her, you set her on fire?” Cantlon asked. “Yes,” said Owusu-Ansah. “And every image that family ever had you ruined?” Cantlon asked. “Yes,” said OwusuAnsah.
The two had been involved in a tumultuous relationship that produced two boys but had ended in the fall of 2012 with Owusu-Ansah facing criminal charges over an alleged assault of the young woman.
In the six-week interval between his arrest on those charges and her slaying, on bail under conditions he stay away from Takyi and on strict house arrest, Ontario Superior Court Justice Eugene Ewaschuk and a jury have heard evidence that Owusu-Ansah basically gave the finger to the court, disobeyed every condition of his bail, and proceeded to harass Takyi by phone and text and stalk her.
That evidence is substantial: Cellphone and text records that show Owusu-Ansah phoning Takyi almost every day at every number he had for her, and then enlisting his family and friends to lean on her to let him see their kids; cell-tower records that show Owusu-Ansah’s phone pinging off the towers near Takyi’s mother’s place, and, la piece de resistance, the day before Takyi was killed, pictures he took of her walking with their boys at her mother’s.
(Takyi had fled her apart- ment and moved to a shelter, and with her new boyfriend, took security precautions to stay safe. But on weekends, when she worked, the two youngsters stayed with her mom.)
But Owusu-Ansah, of course, insisted he’d not been stalking her, that he was only ever interested in seeing his kids, not in punishing Takyi, and that, goodness, he was never, ever angry with her.
“I was upset,” he frequently acknowledged. Or, as he also often put it, “I was hurt.” But never — and he said this even when presented with ominous texts he sent friends he accused of betraying him for siding with Takyi or the message he posted on his Facebook saying, “The end is near” — was he angry.
“Is there anything that makes you angry?” Cantlon asked once.
“When I find Bridget dead, I was really angry,” he said.
“Well, you killed her,” Cantlon pointed out. “You must have been angry at yourself.”
It remains unclear what precisely is Owusu-Ansah’s explanation for the slaying.
In his examination-in-chief, taken through his evidence by his lawyer, Scott Reid, he claimed that he had encountered her by chance outside her mom’s building early that Saturday morning; he had headed there originally, he said, simply to slash the tires on her car.
But then he had a change of heart — not to do less damage, but more — and decided he’d be better off burning the car, which is also why he stopped to buy a canister of gas.
But, Owusu-Ansah maintained, “I wasn’t putting no fear into her … I never intended to put no fear in anyone, let alone the mother of my children.”
His description of the actual killing was vague and brief: Takyi spotted the knife and grabbed it; he went to her car to retrieve it; she lashed out at him with it, cutting him in the hand and leg, and then there was a mysterious “struggle” and he found himself driving to see his girlfriend Nina.
Then he returned to the crime scene, where he found Takyi near death (though she purportedly urged him not to kill himself for the sake of the boys).
Then he left the scene again, returning this time to set her body on fire.
Owusu-Ansah in his examination-in-chief also mentioned an accident in his native country of Ghana, when as a teen he hurt his head going through a window and then abruptly “started punching a guy.” He didn’t remember the punching, he said, but learned of it from friends.
Was this the seed of a braininjury defence? It went unexplored by his lawyer, so if that’s what it was meant to be, the seed is lost now in the strange, unsettling aggression that emanates from Manny Owusu-Ansah, in whose mouth “the mother of my children” sounds like a curse.